We are anguished beyond words at the news this morning of the death in a Singapore hospital of the young woman who was brutally assaulted and gang-raped in a moving bus in Delhi on 16th December.

We hold the Government of India, which took the decision of moving her out of the country despite her fragile condition, against medical advice, responsible for hastening her death.

It is clear that this was a political decision, taken with a cynical and callous disregard for the survival of the young woman.

According to Dr Samiran Nandy, a renowned transplant surgeon of the country, “I just can’t understand why a critically ill patient with infection in blood and body, high grade fever and on the ventilator is being transferred. It will take weeks in this case to even look into the possibility of an intestinal transplant, so why hurry and take the patient out from a facility which works so well. It seems more of a political move”.

Dr Kaushar Mishra of Primus Hospital has expressed similar views, “There is no question of a transplant at this stage. The infection has to be controlled first, and the patient stabilized. I do not understand what the hurry was to take the patient out. Safdarjang Hospital, like other major hospitals in India, has excellent medical facilities and doctors to take care of the critically ill’.

Yet another senior doctor of AIIMS has said, “When the Prime Minister can be treated and operated here, what is the specific medical need to move a patient to Singapore? What the government is saying does not seem to add up”1.

Medical experts across the board are of the view that the doctors at Safdarjang Hospital were doing an excellent job and were taking good care of her.

Indeed, at a time when the government itself is promoting and advertising India as a destination for medical tourism and does not tire of boasting of the excellent medical expertise that the country has, we fail to see why this hurry to move the young woman out of the country on supposedly medical grounds of good treatment, and contrary to expert medical opinion?

The Head of the JPN Apex Trauma Centre, AIIMS, is reported as saying that `the decision was okayed keeping in mind the best interest of the patient and as directed by the Government’2. According to newspaper reports the CM Sheila Dixit was among the first to suggest this idea of treatment abroad3.

The manner in which this lethal decision was taken, with even Health Ministry officials being kept in the dark, shows that it was no more than another cynical gambit in the game of evading accountability for violence against women – yet another attempt to hide from the justified anger of the thousands of citizens on the streets of Delhi who are no longer taken in by the paeans to “good governance” and “progress” trotted out by the government.

The cynicism, callousness and sheer barbarity with which the ruling establishment has handled the public protests of the last weeks matches the brutality of the rape itself and proves their complicity in creating and sustaining a ruthless social, political and economic order that subjects millions of Indian women to violence on a daily basis.

We demand a public enquiry into the decision to shift the young woman out of the country.

We demand a public acceptance of culpability by the Chief Minister of Delhi, the Prime Minister and the President.

We demand justice for the young woman whose untimely and unnecessary death we are mourning today

Women against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS) is a non funded grassroots effort started in November 2009, to put an end to the violence being perpetrated upon our bodies and societies. We are a nationwide network of women from diverse political and social movements comprising of women’s organizations, mass organizations, civil liberty organizations, student and youth organizations, mass movements and individuals. We unequivocally condemn state repression and sexual violence on our women and girls by any perpetrator(s).